How To: Add and Place an Image

Many blog posts will contain media of some sort–usually one or more images. In a desktop-based or laptop-based word processor, adding and positioning images is relatively easy. You click an icon, select an image, drag it around the page to where you want it, re-size it by dragging border anchors and you can flow text around the image in many different ways. Unfortunately, the same is not true of Internet-based editors that are used to create a web page. The features and options available are much more limited.

It is always best to insert images in a blog post after most of the text is already entered. This is because you will need to add images to specific places in the text. In fact, you will normally want to position an image at the beginning of a paragraph–regardless of the final positioning of the image. When it comes to flowing text around an image, you only have two choices when creating a blog post: to the left or to the right of the image. If you want to centre an image on the page, no text will flow on either side.

When you upload an image to a WordPress web site, up to 4 sizes of the same image are created: thumbnail (about 150 x 150 pixels), medium-size (about 300 x 300 pixels), large-size (about 700 x 520 pixels) and the full actual size of the original image.

Adding an image is easy.

Place your cursor at the beginning of a paragraph where you want the image to appear.

Click on the Upload/Insert Media icon shown framed in red above.

On the Add Media form that pops-up, you can choose from where you want to get the image. This can be:

your computer (you can drag and drop from your computer or select by clicking the Select Files button; the uploaded images are placed in the Media Library),

a web page URL (you will need the exact URL from the address bar of your browser),

the Gallery (a list of images you have already used on the page),

the Media Library (where all uploaded images can be found),

or the Lazyest Gallery (which contains images used on web site image galleries).

Select the size of image you want.

Select where you want to position the image: left, right, centre or none (similar to left).

You can add an image title, alternate text (shown when someone hovers their mouse over the image), description, etc.

You can adjust other properties such as the distance in pixels on each side of the image.

Click on the Insert Into Post button.

Repeat Steps 1 to 8 for each image.

If you want to make a change or remove the image from the page, click on the image. Two icons will be displayed. Click the Picture icon to change the image properties or the Delete icon to remove the image altogether. If you want to re-insert an image you already uploaded, you can get it from the Media Library rather than upload it again.

To add a video, audio or other media file to your post, you follow the procedure above images. Some of the options are different for the different types of media.